Nares, Spines, Gaits and Loins: Hunting for Canine Perfection at Westminster

The Washington Post

11:38 JST, February 5, 2026

Every dog at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is a perfect dog because all dogs are perfect creatures. But if you ask their owners and handlers what makes each of these dogs – some of whom appear completely indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, from the dogs of their breed they’re competing against – the most perfect specimen, they will tell you something like:

“He has a really, really nice topline, and he does a nice free stack,” Melissa Stehler says of River, a 3-year-old Pembroke Welsh corgi.

Or: “See how open her nares are?” Perry Payson says of Cliquot, the French bulldog. “See how nice and tight her feet are?”

Or: “He has an even gait that isn’t choppy,” says Erin Karst, the handler of Tater Tot, a tubular little dachshund. “The legs don’t interfere with each other.”

Topline, free stack, nares, gait. These are the words to describe variances in dog perfection, the qualities that the judges here might use to pick the champions from a parade of beautiful, same-seeming canines. (Nares, by the way, are nostrils, a topline is the posture of a dog’s spinal column, and a free stack is when a dog is standing in the correct posture.)

For those watching on TV, the assessment can be a bit inscrutable. A finely dressed man or woman will run their hands over a dog’s head and spine, pull its tail up, lift the flaps of its gums, and sometimes grab the dog’s, er, undercarriage before asking its handler to take it for a little jog.

It’s a visual and tactile task. When Westminster judge Denise Flaim touches a dog, “I’m just confirming with my hands what my eyes are telling me, which is why I’m able to move somewhat quickly,” Flaim says. She checks the neck’s musculature, and whether the “shoulder blades are knit in nicely, or if they’re slapped on like – it’s called ‘mutton withers,’” a polite dog-show diss in reference to the broad shoulders of sheep.

Her hands keep going.

“I pay a lot of attention to the length of the loin,” says Flaim, who judges several hound breeds including Rhodesian ridgebacks, of which she is a former breeder. In the case of ridgebacks, a longer loin can mean a clumsier dog.

“If there’s a male, I’m checking the testicles to make sure there are two. Never found three.” She has encountered dogs with one: “That is a disqualification.” (Would you like to know even more about show dog testicles? “Depending on the breed, they can suck them back up” inside their bodies, Flaim explains, which is why it’s important to check and count them.)

In other words, details matter.

But what about when there are so many different details to compare – like at the group competitions, where puffy Coton de Tulears compete against sleek Xoloitzcuintli?

At that point, the dogs are competing with perfection itself.

Let us explain. Before dogs make it to the evening televised group competition at Westminster, they compete in a preliminary competition against other best dogs of their breed, called conformation. That’s because winning it is based on how well a dog conforms to a breed standard, an American Kennel Club document that describes the physical and temperamental traits of the platonic ideal of each dog. These might be things like the ratio of leg to spine length, or the shape of the eyes, or how many toes they have.

For some breeds with little variation in color or coat, this can mean actual conformity: It would be difficult for a regular person to be able to tell many of the black-and-tan coonhounds apart because they are all, as their name suggests, black and tan. The aforementioned Coton de Tulears are all white and puffy, and complicating things further, two of their handlers wore the exact same pink tweed skirt suit, giving Ring 7 a real glitch-in-the-matrix vibe.

Once dogs advance past their breed competitions into best in group, and then best in show, the judges aren’t comparing them against each other.

Rather, they’re picking the dog that best conforms to its own breed standards. So a Pekingese that is the Pekingesiest Pekingese would beat a beautiful but maybe 0.05 percent flawed Havanese.

“I carry in my mind’s eye the best dog of every breed that I’ve judged,” Flaim says.

Judging a dog show is an art and a science. Not only are judges assessing spines and counting testicles, they’re also considering the beauty of the dog’s movement and how well it carries any flaws it has. This means that, if a dog’s eye is not perfectly round but is well-lined with black (a standard for some breeds), “I might, on an otherwise really super dog, easily forgive that,” Flaim says. If it gets really close between two relatively flawless dogs, their walk can sometimes serve as a tiebreaker.

Westminster’s 150th anniversary is an opportune time to think about what it means to breed dogs.

Not in the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sense – though that view was represented, too, via a giant billboard group erected right in front of the competition, criticizing breeders of flat-faced dogs such as bulldogs and pugs for the breathing problems they can inherit. (The pugs that compete at Westminster undergo genetic testing to ensure they are healthy, handlers say.)

Rather, we mean in the historical and cultural sense. We found ourselves thinking about the texts of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, and also a pug named Spud. (Bear with us.)

In his 1981 philosophical treatise “Simulacra and Simulation,” Baudrillard posited that simulacra evolve through phases of imitation, ranging from a faithful representation of an original to a copy of a copy of a copy that no longer resembles the original but is seen as more authentic than the original ever was.

Spud the pug – a philosopher in his own right, no doubt – has traits in common with his ancient Chinese ancestors. But historical paintings of the breed show that their legs may have been longer and their snouts protruded farther from their faces, rather than melting into a flat pile of vaguely nose-shaped wrinkles. A viewer might think it looks more like what we call a puggle (a pug-beagle mix) today.

In today’s pugs, “The legs need to be proportional to their body size,” says Elizabeth Russell, Spud’s owner and handler. Long legs are a fault.

But when a judge like Flaim sees a pug – or perhaps an azawakh, or a saluki, or a Maltese, or any number of other breeds that are tied to a culture and a place – she thinks about the entire history of people and their pets, across millennia.

“I think some people see purebred dogs as these sort of fanciful creations,” Flaim says. But they’re actually “little remnants of history, and they reflect all of their various attributes, whether it’s their size or their type of hair or how they move, it’s all reflective of a time and a place and the people that created them.”

Sometimes, that’s a copy of a copy of a copy.

“The pharaoh hound went extinct in Egypt and then found its way to Malta, and so are we reviving the dog of Egypt? Are we reviving the dog of Malta?” she says. “It’s imprecise. History’s a continuum.”

Pugs used to sit on the laps of nobles, and now they sit on ours, so we can feel like nobility. Dachshunds are shaped that way so they could burrow in holes, a skill transferrable to couches and blankets. Rhodesian ridgebacks were bred to hunt lions in southern Africa, and on Monday, I watched one gently accept a morsel of treat from its handler’s warm palm.

Watching Flaim through several different breed competitions, I never was able to accurately predict her winner. In my eyes, they were all too perfect to choose.